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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Turning Points

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Turning Points

05/06/2011

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Sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring some of life's turning points.

Helena Bonham Carter and Hugh Bonneville feature in a sequence of poetry, prose and music exploring some of life's turning points.

In this edition of Words & Music Helena Bonham Carter and Hugh Bonneville explore Turning Points, from life-changing and epoch-making, to funny and insignificant. 

Love is the pivot for many of the programme's turning points. Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, artist Marc Chagall, and Coleridge fall in it; Dorothea (in George Eliot's 'Middlemarch') and Carol Ann Duffy's Eurydice fall out of it; Alan Bennett movingly describes his mother's final days. 

Revolutions provide other turning points: the Industrial one provokes opposing reactions from Erasmus Darwin and William Blake; Igor Stravinsky self-consciously remembers his musical one, and Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst recalls her part in an episode in the fight for Women's Suffrage. 

The lives of Hilaire Belloc's Matilda and the Bible's Saul are changed forever by versions of the truth, and there's a culinary miracle when eggs and oil emulsify into a mayonnaise, according to Julia Child's instructions. 

Music is by Bach, Beethoven, Janacek, Rachmaninov, Vaughan Williams and Erma Franklin, among others.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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